Monday, February 27, 2017

UltraNetatmo3 HSPI is a great plugin for Homeseer that lets you add local weather sensors to your Homeseer home automation. Not only can you make you home aware of things like rain or CO2 levels but it monitors the WiFi, battery and last updated status so can be alerted in your favorite way that there is a problem without having to monitor your site page. This is especially useful as there seems to be no native or IFTTT notification for these. The above link has screen shots and a link to the 6 page user manual.

Sunday, February 26, 2017

Netatmo sent out an email with a 20% off promo code so I checked on Amazon and found they have marked them down to 26% off so I added one to my station. The wind gauge was not marked down so I ordered it direct from Netatmo to get the 20% off. Should be here soon.This is how I mounted it.

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

A good while back I switched to uploading data to Wunderground using a Meteobridge It works great for uploading and pushing some alerts. To get even limited charting though you need to get the pro version Both require specialized hardware which is under powered. Kind of like the home automation dilemma and why I now run Homeseer on a PC instead of using the more popular hubs. Anyway I've continued to use WeatherLink as a console and as a backup. WeatherLink does OK charting but is Windows only, looks like a Windows 3 app and has not been updated since 2012. I could just leave up my Wunderground page open in a browser to see charts but I'd loose the backup feature and some of the stuff does not show up on Wunderground like indoor temp and most of the soil sensors.
The real problem came with Windows 10 which tends to reboot at the most inopportune times leaving the app off line unless you defeat login protection. Then the security camera console (the main thing running on that box) started locking up on that PC and the other PC running the security camera software plus and Homeseer. A third box that is clone of those, except that it only runs the security camera software and Chrome, works fine. So I started looking for non Windows options again. What I found was WeeWX It does the same things as Meteobridge, plus charting, runs on many flavors of Linux on Raspberry PI and Intel, even MacOS and best of all it is free. You can even import your old data from Wunderground back into it. The basic template looks like this
A bit wasteful on space but not a bad starting point. If you know a bit about HTML and CSS it is fairly simple to make this your own. Mine ended up like this

Now that I can read without glasses. Notice I added code to change the color of the current readings based on the value too so I can easily spot problems. Soil temp 2, temp 4 and moist 3, for example obviously are having problems that need looked at. And soil moist 1 and 2 alert me they need watering.

Gotchas:

The only gotcha I've found so far was it did not read from the Davis station till I lowered the polling to once a minute.

Cons:

The only thing I've found so far Meteobridge has over WeeWX is alert notifications. Meteobridge gives you many simple to implement options

But WeeWX pretty much only has the pay service OpsGenie to send you alerts without having to code something up yourself. (See Adding a service.) Check out the WeeWx Wiki to see all the driver, service, skin and uploader extensions that are available.